"Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton — well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature."
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Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesAcademics from GermanyPhilosophers from GermanyMarxists from the United States
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Erich Fromm
1900 – 1980
aus dem Amerikanischen von Liselotte und Ernst Mickel, Rowohlt TB, Hamburg 1977, ISBN 3-499-17052-3; Original: "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness" Holt, Rinehart & Winston, N.Y. 1973
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